Page 95 - Build Your Own Quadcopter_ Power Up Your Designs with the Parallax Elev-8

74 Bu il d Y o ur O w n Q u a d c o p t e r

Figure 4.4 Information Dialog box showing the active USB comm port.

development. The BOE is set up to communicate with a Win 7 laptop running PST version
1.3.2. There should be a USB comm port driver automatically loaded to allow your PC to
detect and communicate with whatever Prop development board you choose to use. Clicking
on the Run drop-down menu will reveal an Identify Hardware choice. Clicking on this will
pop up an Information Dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.4.
I decided to go through some of the tutorials that are carefully detailed in the Propeller
User’s Manual. I will start specifically with the Blinker1 program. I did have to slightly modify
the original program that is shown in the manual in order to accommodate the available
GPIO pins on the BOE. Figure 4.5 is a screenshot of the modified Blinker1 program.
This figure shows the PST development screen that Parallax calls its Integrated Explorer.
The Explorer’s central portion is an editor area where the Spin code is input and modified.
There are some two pane areas on the left side of the Explorer that show the current directory
along with the files contained in that directory. I deliberately selected the _Demos directory,
which is part of the Propeller Library. You can easily see a variety of Spin programs that are
available in the file-listing pane. Incidentally, the Propeller Library is part of the PST
download.

Figure 4.5 Blinker1 Spin program.